I’m always on the lookout for metrics to indicate where voters stand as compared to where they stood before. So I decided to take the admittedly incomplete Associated Press election results tonight for New Jersey and to see how voters stand now as they did before. New Jersey has been an arena of political conflict between Republican Governor Chris Christie and the public employee unions and, as I noted in my earlier blogpost this evening, the returns from the Associated Press indicated that Democrats have maintained their 24-16 majority in the state Senate despite Christie’s (mildly) positive job ratings in New Jersey polls.
But that bottom line doesn’t tell the full story. I decided to look not just at seats won or lost (no party either gained or lost a seat) but at the total votes cast. And when I added up the incomplete returns, I got the following totals, which don’t include anything from the 8th Senate district, where the wonderfully American named Republican incumbent, Dawn Addiego, was unopposed and the AP did not report the number of votes cast for her:
Democratic candidates 651,356 52%
Republican candidates 592,214 47%
Other candidates 4,427 0%
These numbers will probably be a little obsolete by the time you read this, but they do tell a story. Why do Republicans fare so poorly, winning just 16 of 40 districts, with 47% of the vote? One reason is that New Jersey has lots of immigrants, and in heavy-immigration areas very few votes are cast (partly because there aren’t all that many U.S. citizens there) and very few are cast for Republicans. In contrast, in affluent suburbs lots of votes are cast, and Republicans tend to do better than Democrats but Democrats do still get quite a few votes. Redistricting, by a purportedly nonpartisan commission in which the tie-breaking vote is always cast by a guy who is purportedly a nonpartisan expert but who is also a liberal academic at Rutgers, tends to favor Democrats (and incumbents) as well. If you add 20,000 or so votes that might have been cast for Addiego, you reduce the Republican popular vote advantage to 51%-48%, though you might argue that we should also add in some imputed number of votes for Addiego’s nonexistent Democratic opponent.
Anyway, the bottom line is that a state that has been labeled safe Democratic for some time—though it really wasn’t before 1996—is now only marginally Democratic. Not a good omen for Barack Obama and the Democratic party heading toward accountability at the polls just a little bit less than a year from today.
